Why Advertisers Will Leave Facebook

Facebook continues to make missteps with both their users and business partners. How many times can they afford to make bad business decisions before businesses and or users, abandon the social media platform. In the latest inadvertent‎ admission by Facebook revealed that organic reach is falling dramatically and falling short on reach. Why this is occurring and their response is flabbergasting. Yes, I used the word flabbergasting.

To set the stage, the news was discovered in a pitch deck that found its way to Ad Age. The deck contained several statements explaining the shift, "expect organic distribution of an individual page's posts to gradually decline over time" and paid distribution "to maximize delivery of your message in news feed" and finally "Your brand can fully benefit from having fans when most of your ads show social context, which increases advertising effectiveness and efficiency,"

See full Adage Facebook article here 

In sum, Facebook is attempting to further monetize the platform while compromising their initial mission and vision: 

Facebook's mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.

This new direction will only empower sharing of content from large advertisers and organizations that can afford to advertise on the platform. Additionally, content that will be exposed to users will be selected based on this algorithmic system that is skewed towards paid content. Content that could be valuable for users to share will be either scarce or never exposed. As a direct result, advertisers will move to other platforms that allow for their content to be properly exposed and shared at the discretion of the user. 

Consumers are becoming savvy to platform's control and influence and do not like when knowing their content exposure is being controlled or selected for them. They want to control the type, frequency and means as to what content exposure they receive. Will Facebook backtrack on this new model or will they just continue to believe that the platform is too large that missteps like this will not receive dire results. I guess we will wait and see how the fallout plays itself out.

Michael Newhouse
WCNgroup
wcngroup@gmail.com